In the early centuries of the 2nd millennium BC, Canaanites began to infiltrate the Egyptian Delta. The donkey caravans of Canaanite traders can be seen in a number of Egyptian tomb paintings. By 1700 BC the number of Canaanites was so great that they contributed to the collapse of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom. They then seized political control of the Delta and established a local dynasty known as the Hyksos (Shepherd Kings). With the Hyksos in control of Egypt, Canaanite culture flourished. The prosperity that followed led to competition between the city-states of the Levant as reflected by major rampart fortifications at nearly every large site. During this period the Cannanites developed an alphabetic writing system that was passed on to the Phoenicians.

Around 1550 BC the Hyksos were driven from Egypt by the energetic kings of the Eighteenth Dynasty. After a series of military campaigns they established an ‘Asiatic Empire’ and so dominated Canaan as far north as Byblos in modern Lebanon. Further north, the coastal city of Ugarit flourished amid the economic, political, social, and cultural competition among the Egyptians and the civilisations of the Aegean (Minoan, Mycenaean), Mesopotamia (Mitanni, Assyria, Babylonia), and Anatolia (Hittites). Records at Ugarit were written in Mesopotamian Akkadian cuneiform as well as an alphabetic form of cuneiform recording the local Canaanite language.